From London
As asking for a truce, the government urged the conservative parliamentary party to respect Monday’s result in favor of the continuity of Boris Johnson. Emboldened by the prime minister’s Pyrrhic victory, the rebels responded, for the time being off, that they will not give up until Johnson leaves office. According to the morning The Guardian they are willing to paralyze the government’s legislative agenda to the point of creating an ungovernable situation in a parliamentary system.
In an unprecedented intervention for a former Conservative leader, William Hague, who led the party from 1997 to 2001, signaled that Johnson should resign. “There have been things said that cannot be taken back, reports that cannot be erased and votes that show a level of rejection that no Conservative leader has been able to reverse. He should acknowledge it and plan his exit in such a way that the party and country do not have to undergo a painful period of agony and uncertainty,” Hague wrote in the morning paper. The Times.
pyrrhic victory
The headlines of the written press, mostly conservative, draw a prime minister mortally wounded for victory (211 Tory MPs in favor of Johnson, 148 against). “Hollow victory tears Tories apart” headlined the doyen of the “serious” Tory press, the Daily Telegraph. “A wounded winner”, seconded the The Times, which included the devastating article by William Hague. “Party is over, Boris” is the title of
the left the tabloid Daily Mirror, in an ingenious play on words that includes the “Party” of a political party and the party or “Partygate” that is in the background of the crisis.
In a radio interview on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Dominic Raab led the government’s response to this widespread perception of Pyrrhic victory. “I think we got a decisive and clear victory and that should be the end of the debate. There are a lot of things in terms of political agenda that bring us together and that should point the way forward,” Raab said.
The response of one of the referents of the rebels was immediate. According to Tobias Ellwood, the parliamentary rebellion was so massive – 148 deputies out of the 359 that make up the caucus – that the prime minister has to make an impossible 180-degree turn if he wants to survive. “At least a change of cabinet, with new figures and new issues that speak to the entire country and not just to our base. Policies more exciting than the privatization of channel 4 or the return to the imperial measurement system (….the inches, miles, pounds that have been phased out since the 1960s…), policies that deal with the cost-of-living crisis,” he said. Ellwood.
Johnson’s plans
None of the rebels’ demands figure in the prime minister’s plans. This week Boris Johnson will confirm that the government is going to present a bill to eliminate the protocol that governs Northern Ireland as part of the agreement with the European Union for Brexit. This will inflame the most partisan tensions and will confirm that the United Kingdom is willing to violate the same treaty that the prime minister signed with its main trading partner in November 2019, a month before being elected with an overwhelming majority.
On Thursday he will announce changes to the right to purchase subsidized houses amid the housing crisis, particularly notable in London. The prime minister also has announcements up his sleeve about the NHS, crime and cost of living. According to leaks to the press, the prime minister will say that “this is a government that does what the people need” and will continue to do so.
These bills will test the rebels’ strategy of stalling Johnson’s legislative agenda. The rebels are a strange mixture of the most progressive section of the Conservatives and reactionaries who share many ideas with the government, but have grown weary of the extravagant idiosyncrasies of the prime minister.
Crisis in sight and black swans
The party’s internal rules establish that once the prime minister draws a vote of confidence, a year must pass before the parliamentary party can vote again on the issue. But the rules can be changed as admitted by the head of the 1922 (non-government bloc of parliamentarians), Graham Brady.
In other words, the rules are not eternal: they depend on politics. The antecedents, so important in British history and law, show that the four Conservative prime ministers who survived votes of confidence did not last long in their posts. Even that totemic figure of post-war conservatism, Margaret Thatcher, was thrown out the door when the party considered that she had become an electoral danger.
There are two very close visible events that can mark this turning point. In two and a half weeks, on June 23, there are two “bye-elections” (elections for the renewal of deputies in specific constituencies) that are key to measuring the impact of the current crisis. In a rural town in England’s southwestern affluent, Tiverton and Honiton, the Conservatives are about to lose a seat that traditionally belongs to them to the Liberal Democrats. That same day, the election in Wakefield will be an x-ray of what is happening in the poor and deindustrialized north that Johnson managed to conquer in 2019 with a lot of Brexit and nationalism, but that after more than two years, he seems ready to return to the Labor fold.
A calamitous defeat may push Johnson’s timid supporters to change their position, taking into account that the government’s decline puts their own seats in jeopardy. To this is added the parliamentary inquiry to be launched shortly on whether Boris Johnson lied to Parliament when he said he had not attended any party at 10 Downing Street.
The investigation by Scotland Yard and career civil servant Sue Gray, based on just 15 of the more than 100 meetings at 10 Downing Street, found that Johnson participated in at least five events that contravened the government’s lockdown policy. A photo released after the report by the Metropolitan Police, who sought to protect the prime minister as much as he could and is now on the hook, shows Johnson toasting with a glass of champagne as he addresses participants at another party. unforgettable.
The Party Gate, which began at the end of November with the denunciation of a meeting at 10 Downing Street during the pandemic, has been characterized by an inexhaustible reserve of black swans. Every time everything seemed said about the scandal, a photo or a testimony or an event emerged that surpassed everything seen, as was the party at 10 Downing Street on the eve of Prince Philip’s funeral last year.
Against this background, with so many enemies seen and unseen, who dares to bet that Johnson will stay in office for a long time?